bread and more

Category Archives: Desserts

Since I didn’t go into work on Thursday, I had a box of Stan’s Glazed Donuts at my disposal. Since there was no way I was going to throw them away, I knew it was time to let necessity take action. The best donuts in California will beget the best bread pudding, right?

Ingredients:

5 glazed donuts, cut into 1″ cubes

2 c heavy cream

1/4 c sugar

4 g salt

4 eggs

Method:

Combine heavy cream, sugar, salt, and eggs and mix thoroughly with a wisk.

We had some left over country loaf from Sunday’s bake. After a two days of eating bread with dinner, find I thought it would be good to have bread for dessert. A few months back, we had been watching The Best Thing I Ever Ate’s Rise and Shine Episode. What caught both our eyes was the thick cut pain perdue.

We only used one 2″ thick slice of bread, so I quartered the recipe.

Ingredients:

1 2″ slice of country bread

1 c heavy cream

1/4 c sugar

2 g salt

2 eggs

2 tbs unsalted butter

AP flour and sugar for sprinkling

Powdered sugar for dusting

Method:

Combine heavy cream, sugar, salt, and eggs and mix thoroughly with a wisk.

Pour mixture over bread, let sit for a few minutes, and flip the bread. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Heat large oven proof pan over medium to medium high heat. Melt butter.

Sprinkle flour and sugar on the bread, and when the foam subsides cook the bread on one side until richly colored, approximately 5 minutes.

Flip the bread and put the pan in the oven for 10-15 minutes until cooked.

Our friends also had a newborn in recent weeks and we arranged to meet up today. I had baked some sourdough batards, rubella but unfortunately we cancelled on them. Our daughter’s eating is taking too long, abortion which makes long excursions impossible.

note the slight overproof.
For Cancer research, troche
our company had an internal bake sale. Spent the morning making morning buns.

Those in the foreground were mini buns (regular muffin/cupcake pan) and others were the standard size buns (large muffin pan).

Mid-week bread baking was successful as I found a way to work the Tartine recipe into a weekday schedule.
1. Feed starter at night
2. Leaven the next morning
3. Mix and shape the dough in the evening
4. Proof overnight
5. Back the following morning.

In total time, that’s 2.5 days. But since I was able to stack schedules, I baked two days in the row.

The first day, I baked 650g batards. Of the 6 batards made, only 2 were photo worthy. All 6 had nice rise and had a moist crumb.

The second day, I baked twelve 325g baguettes. While my standard recipe baguette recipe yielded physically larger loafs with better rise, the coloring and ear was more pronounced on the sourdoughs. Still can’t get the proper overlap of scores. This will require more work.

Because I made twelve baguettes, I needed to bake in two batches. For the first batch, the stone oven was a comfortable 475 degrees. By the second batch, the stone oven had dropped to 425 degrees. As you can imagine, two very different breads.

Rise, color, interior texture was less desirable on the lower temperature bread.

At 475 degrees:

At 425 degrees:

While this matters if you’re making baguettes to sell, for co-workers, the blond baguettes are still desirable. Here’s the dozen, packed and ready to go.

Ingredients:

280 g AP Flour

150 g sugar (plus 50 g for coating)

5 g salt

10 g baking powder

4 g vanilla extract

30 g melted butter

2 large eggs, beaten

170 ml of milk

Method:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Spray donut pans

Mix flour, sugar,
salt and baking powder

Mix vanilla extract, butter, eggs and milk

Combine wet and dry ingredients, do not overmix

Pour into pan, filling 3/4 full

Bake for 8 minutes

Allow to cool until only slightly warm and then place donuts on wire rack

Dip each donut into sugar to coat, returning to rack to completely cool

Another fine use for laminated dough is pain au chocolat. I’ve been making mine with semi-sweet chocolate and rotating between using an egg wash and not.

The egg wash does provide a nice sheen, gerontologist and is more professional in appearance. However, ailment for homemade versions, I don’t find it necessary. Okay, that’s really an excuse. The real reason is that I’m usually too eager to eat and I forget the wash on most occasions.

I have been making morning buns as of late. But after a two week hiatus, I almost forgot the recipe. In prior bakes, I wasn’t documenting (rare) since I was baking in rapid succession. I was simply working off a base recipe while making my own adjustments. However, with me almost forgetting the recipe, I thought it best to write it down for prosperity.

Morning Bun Recipe

Makes 12 morning buns.

Ingredients:

Detrempe

600 g all-purpose flour

60 g sugar

12 g kosher salt

10 g instant yeast

200 g tepid water

200 g tepid milk

30 g of melted butter or oil

Topping

100 g sugar

20 g cinnamon

2 tbs of melted butter

Butter Block

2 stick unslalted butter, sliced horizontally into 18 planks

Method:

Mix flour, sugar, yeast, and salt

Mix in milk, water, and butter/oil until ingredients are incorporated

With a dough scraper, fold the dough once so that it’s not a shaggy mess. However, don’t overwork.*

Rest for 60 minutes, until dough doubles in size

Roll dough into a 14″ x 18″ square

Place the butter planks on the dough, emulating a butter block**

Fold the dough so that the butter is completely covered and letter fold #1

Roll the dough out and letter fold #2***

Rest the dough in the refrigerator, covered, for 20 minutes. Prep 2 large muffin pans with butter.****

Melt about 2tbs of butter. Mix sugar and cinnamon for topping mixture.

Roll the dough out into a 14″ x 18″ rectangle

Brush dough with melted butter and spread the topping

Roll dough into cylinder

Cut into approx. 2.5″ pieces, yielding 12 rounds

Place each round into a muffin spot

Proof for 60 minutes, about 30 minutes before preheat oven to 400 degrees

Put the morning buns into the oven and lower heat to 375 degrees. Bake for 18-25 minutes.

Take out of the oven, let cool a minute or two, then remove the morning bugs from the pan and cool on a wire rack

After you can gently handle, coat each bun in sugar.

* One fold smooths out the dough. I don’t do more folds or knead as I don’t want to develop a lot of gluten.

** I thought I was all slick for doing this cheater lamination, until I looked at a Jacques Pepin book and he’s been doing for ages.

*** I used to do 3 folds ala a croissant, but found that I like the texture of 2 folded dough for my morning buns.

**** If I only do 2 folds, I don’t rest the dough in the refrigerator for 20 minutes. With 2 folds the gluten hasn’t been worked sufficiently and the dough remains easy to roll out. With 3 folds, the rest of the dough is quite welcome.

Not surprisingly, the number #1 Google search for morning bun recipe takes you to Tartine’s recipe. I’ve had Tartine’s morning buns and can confirm that they are quite delicious. While my first attempts were fair, surgery they were far from Tartine’s or any professional bakeries’ product.

This weekend, I decided to use Reinhart’s “artisan breads every day” croissant recipe. Because the doughs are all designed to go into the fridge to proof, it works well for me. What didn’t work well was my inability to read the instructions (and to do mental math).

With the 200g of leaven, I made the croissant dough but failed to add any milk. During mixing, the dough was too dry and I eyeballed some water to allow it to come together. The dough was stiff, almost like pasta dough – far from any bread dough. I hadn’t realized that I miss read the recipe, so I just threw it in the fridge as is.

The next day, I made the morning buns. Again I used my lazy lamination technique, and with the cool pasta like dough, the lamination went along quite well. One book fold and 3 envelope folds later, I was looking at 54 layers. Don’t know how people get more layers without the dough tearing. I don’t have solar hands for sure.

From here I used Tartine’s recipe and set the oven to 375 degrees. After rolling the buns, I placed them into large muffin tins and allowed for a 1.5 hour proof. The buns baked for 25 minutes (Tartine says 45), and they come out flaky and tender.

It’s been a few months since my last batch of kouign amann and co-workers had been missing them (a good thing for sure). In order to get a more caramelized crust, I baked on the middle lower rack for 15 minutes and upper middle for 10 at 375 degrees F.

200g of leaven needed to be used and Elissa liked morning buns – a Wisconsin treat that has found a second home in San Francisco. There is something magical about laminated pastries. Probably the butter.

The sweet bread recipe from Reinhart’s “artisan bread every day” book combined with my lazy lamination technique resulted in these morning buns. More practice is required to get shaping correct, malady but it’s not like I’m going throw these out.